Thank you.
So nice to see you all.
This is the first of our Prose Series events
to be exclusively alum-driven.
These are all alums.
I see a lot of alums in the audience tonight.
Let this be a spur to you and your work, to get the book out.
And let us know, because we'd like to bring in more alums
back to the program to read.
So first, I'd like to welcome you all to our second Prose
Series event of the semester.
I'm Ander Monson.
As Hannah mentioned, I'm director of the Prose Series,
and tonight we host three fiction writers, one of whom
has gone astray.
So let me first invite you to one more event.
We are having out-- the MFA program
is hosting a little homecoming event for the EXO roasting
company next Friday, which is 403 North 6th Avenue.
It's at their workspace that's attached to it, so Friday
night at 7 o'clock.
We didn't know it was homecoming, but like, oh,
it's homecoming.
So we should do something.
So those of you who are MFA alums, please
come by and say hello.
Have a snack, and have a drink, and come see Tucsonan Ela
Harrison, and MFA alums Paco Cantú, and Kati Standefer,
who all have essays in this year's edition of the Best
American Essays, edited by Jonathan Franzen.
So we'll have books for sale there, thanks to Antigone.
And we'd like to invite all of our alums
and anyone else, which is you guys, who
are interested to come check in with us
and hear three Best American essayists read from three Best
American Essays.
So our readers tonight, in order,
are Lawrence Lenhart, introduced by some chump,
Ben Rybeck introduced by the excellent Buzz Poverman,
and Natasha Stagg introduced by the fabulous Aurelie Sheehan.
So as Hannah mentioned, we're going
to skip the Q and A. The only answer you need is the books.
But if you need more answers, you can buy the books
and harass the writers.
That's fine too.
So as to minimize confusion in introducing the introducers,
I'm the chump who's introducing Lawrence Lenhart.
And this way, I don't need to introduce myself.
And I can do my introduction and get to the good stuff, which
is Lawrence Lenhart.
He's one of my favorite students of all time, not just
for his exceptionally obsessive personality,
and his prodigious and possibly amphetamine-enhanced work
ethic.
[LAUGHTER]
I seem to remember his novel, which was at this point,
I think, at least 500 pages.
And I suggested he might want to cut it, I don't know,
in half, which seemed to resist his attempt to trim it,
that over the weekend added another 300 pages that he
brought back to me.
You failed in your attempt to do that,
but it was a very Lawrence Lenhart moment.
But he's also become one of my favorite writers because
of his doggedness.
He's willing to follow ideas and leads that are seemingly so
embarrassing, unpromising, unwise, or illegal, that most
other saner writers, at most, get
a few sentences deep before giving up on them, and closing,
and then deleting the Word file, and deleting
the application in Microsoft Word,
and wiping their hard drive.
[LAUGHTER]
But Lawrence does not give up there, to his credit,
or maybe he's just not technically sophisticated.
In his fiction, and increasingly his nonfiction,
he goes all the way.
Some might call this a flaw, but to me it's a feature.
Yes, the world needs that essay about dog fellatio,
and shame, and memory.
They need it to get written and published,
and be out there vibrating intensely and permanently
in the world.
We need the weird, super fussy, visual essay
about turtle carapaces, and the one
he's working on now about island nations
sure to be eventually engulfed by water, thanks to climate
change, that's inexplicably concretely in the form,
typographically, of the shorelines
of those islands, as he explains,
which seems really difficult to do.
But that's a kind of Lawrence Lenhart joint.
I mean that we need our artists like Lawrence,
the one for whom no idea seems too bad to make it good.
And I mean, not just good.
I mean to make it really great, which is what he does.
So let us welcome back Lawrence Lenhart.